Ronnie Burns has always been an honest, likeable,
no-frills, boy-next-door Aussie pop star and entertainer –
nothing more, nothing less. He began his musical career as a folk
singer in Melbourne before catching the ‘Beatle
bug’ in 1964, whereapon he became a founding member of The
Flies.

The Flies

Alongside Bobby
& Laurie Melbourne combo The Flies were (as their
insect name indicates) one of the very first bands in Melbourne to
catch on to the new 'beat' style and gained attention as
"Victoria’s top Beatle-alikes", even down to their matching
suits and very long mop-top hair. A shambolic, noisy bunch at the best
of times, the quartet achieved considerable popularity on the booming
Melbourne dance circuit, with a repertoire of Brit-vasion standards
from the catalogues of The Searchers, The Hollies and
Herman’s Hermits and others, along with some of the
‘bluesier’, more raucous Beatles numbers like "When
I Get Home" and "You Can’t Do That".

The Flies toured interstate during late 1964 and early
1965 under the guidance of manager Gary Spry,
and had one of their brightest moments supporting The Rolling Stones on
their first Australian
tour in January 1965. But when Spry heard the real
"Aussie
Beatle-alikes", The
Twilights at the Oxford Club in Adelaide, he dropped his
former clients like the proverbial hot brick and took over The
Twilights instead ... a good move for Spry & the
‘Lights, but not such a good omen for The Flies. Ronnie quit
the band in August 1965 to go solo, to be replaced by Peter Nicol. The
Flies lasted only a few months longer and are now sadly relegated to
being a footnote in the story of Burns’ solo career.

Solo career

Another twist of fate plays a prominent part in the
Burns story, because Ronnie was a childhood friend of future music
journalist, pop guru and producer Ian "Molly"
Meldrum. Some of the hilarious and outrageous
stories Ronnie can tell, including the classic tale about him and
Meldrum being ejected from The Beatles’
1964 Festival Hall concert, have become the stuff of OzRock folklore,
and there’s sure to be a good book lurking in the wings!

Ronnie's clean-cut image, appealing, boyish, dimpled
good looks and impeccable sartorial presentation immediately made him a
favoured TV and pin-up star when he launched his solo career under the
aegis of leading Melbourne impresario Jeff Joseph. In
his 2002 This Is Your Life profile, Russell
Morris revealed that seeing Ronnie's solo success first-hand was the
direct impetus for him to leave Somebody's Image and go solo himself.
Ronnie could often be seen on pop TV shows including The Go!!
Show and Uptight, as well as in the pages
and on the covers of Everybody’sand Go-Set
magazines
-– and his Go-Set 'cred' was certainly not hurt
by his close friendship with Molly!

While Ronnie perhaps never quite inspired heights of
frantic fan adulation as, say, Normie Rowe, he was extremely
popular, and enjoyed a series of strong chart hits, many written and/or
produced by the cream of Aussie pop composers and backed by some of our
top musicians. And he was voted
Australia’s most popular male performer, or "King Of Pop", on
more than one occasion.

Ronnie's was consistently successful in his hometown of
Melbourne, and his popularity gradually spread thanks to regular TV and
concert appearances. He signed a solo recording contract with the Spin label, and his
debut solo single for them was "Very Last Day" / "Let It Be Me".
The A-side, "Very Last Day" was written by Paul
Stookey and Peter Yarrow, of Peter Paul & Mary
fame. It made the Top 20 in Melbourne in June 1966, as did the
follow-up, "True True Lovin'" / "Too Many People" (#17
in September), and it also made the new Go-Set national Top
40, first published in the 5 October 1966 edition, coming in at #22 in
the inaugural chart. Both "Very Last Day" and "Too
Many People" had also been performed by The Hollies on their third album Hollies (Oct.
1965), and its likely
that this album was the source of the songs.

Ronnie scored major success on the singles chart by
tapping into a rich vein of material written by his illustrious
label-mates The Bee Gees.
part of the large group of songs they wrote and
recorded just before they left for the UK, but did not
release. Many of the original unreleased Bee Gees demos and
studio recordings of the songs Ronnie covered were eventually issued on
LP by Festival, and a full compilation was issued on the 1998
Festival compilation CD Brilliant
From Birth. Ronnie was one of several Aussie
artists who scored significant hits with Bee Gees songs,
although the
brothers themselves had been unable to score a
hit until their very last Australian single, "Spicks and
Specks".
They became increasingly disenchanted with their lack of recognition in
Australia, so at the beginning of 1967 they returned to England, where
they
had immense success. This group of songs, including those covered by
Ronnie, were among the last that the Bee Gees
wrote and recorded in Australia, and they also mark the first time that
Bee Gees compositions were jointly credited to all three brothers.
According to Bee Gees expert Joseph Brennan, the songs were
subsequently used as
demos for other artists, although they are clearly well above average
demo
quality and may in fact have been intended as tracks for a possible
1967 LP which never came to fruition.

The Bee Gees penned Ronnie's third solo single "Coalman" /
"All The King's Horses"
especially for him, and it became the first of many of Gibb songs that
he covered. It was a major hit, making both the Sydney and
Melbourne Top 10 in
January 1967. A catchy, Beatle-esque ditty, "Coalman"
became a national Top 10 hit, debuting at #21 on the Go-Set top 40 on 18
January 1967, peaking at #6 in the last week of February, and charting
for twelve weeks in all. It opens with one of the
earliest examples of reverse tape effects on an Australian pop
recording.
Both tracks were all-star cuts reportedly feature the three Gibb
brothers on
harmony vocals, with instrumental backing by top instrumental band The Strangers,
whose guitarist John Farrar
was the arranger for the single. Farrar went on to become one of our
most successful
expatriate musicians; after settling in the UK in the 70s, he hooked up
with ex-members of The Shadows in Marvin, Welch & Farrar and he
produced and/or arranged many major hits for Cliff Richard and Olivia
Newton-John.

"Coalman" was followed by another
brisk, hard-beat Gibb number, "Exit Stage Right" / "In The Morning"
which becam eanother national Top 20 hit, peaked at #19 at the
end of July. "We Had A Good Thing
Going" (#36, Oct. '67). At the end of the year Ronnie was
voted Most Popular Australian Male Vocalist in the Go-Set Pop Poll,
and
ABC TV filmed a documentary about him called The Life Of
Ronnie Burns.

Meanwhile, Ronnie continued his run of success with a
fine set of top-selling singles. His growing popularity was certainly
assisted by the fact that his biggest competitor, Normie Rowe, had been
away from the local scene, first with trips to Europe and America in
1967, and then by his call up for National Service in early 1968.

The
Groop’s songwriting team of Brian Cadd and Max
Ross, provided Ronnie with both sides of his next single, "When I Was 6
Years
Old", which charted briefly in Go-Set, reaching
#28 (Mar. 1968), and the song also did well in England where
it was covered by former Manfred Mann vocalist Paul Jones.

Ronnie's next single -- and one of his best -- was the
magnificent "Age Of Consent" (#16, Jan. 1969), a
lush, emotive ballad penned by The Twilights’ Terry
Britten, and featuring most of that band as backing musicians. Britten
wrote quite a few songs for Burns, as did Johnny Young.
By then a fading teen-pop sensation himself, Young embarked on a hugely
successful songwriting career in the late 60s, and Ronnie was the
recipient of many of his best songs. As the story goes, Young
had
earmarked one of favourites songs for Ronnie, but when Molly Meldrum
heard Johnny playing it in the Uptight
dressing
room in late 1968, he pulled out all the stops to secure the song for
his new protege, Russell
Morris. The song was of course "The Real Thing",
and one can only speculate on the outcome for both singers if the song
had gone to Burns rather than Morris).

Also during 1968 Ronnie appeared in the pilot episode of
a proposed Monkees-styled TV series with his mates The Twilights,
Entitled Once
Upon A Twilight, the show starred the group as
themselves, with comedienne and IMT star Mary Hardy (sister of
celebrated author Frank Hardy) as the their secretary, Ronnie as
"Alphonse", a wanna-be singer, and character actress and Crawfords
regular Madeleine Orr as Ronnie's mum. In one of the music sequences,
Ronnie performs a Barry Gibb song, "In The Morning", backed by The
Twilights.

All the participants would probably agree that the show
was not a great moment in Australian telelvision, although it was
really no any worse than any other similar pop-group/pop star film or
TV venture of the day. Certainly only Shorrock and Burns showed any
acting ability whatsoever, and the rest of the Twlilghts were, frankly,
pretty dreadful. But more importantly, it failed to impress either the
network or the sponsor, so the series never went ahead. Fortunately
though, the pilot has survived and it is now part of Screensound
national archive. Pirate copies also circulate among collectors.

Ronnie toured the land extensively over the next few
years, one notable appearance being as part of the 1969 "Operation
Starlift" extravaganza, alongside Johnny Young and Johnny
Farnham and top groups of the day like The Masters
Apprentices, Zoot, Doug
Parkinson In Focus and The Valentines.
Although he had arguably peaked in popularity by this time, Ronnie
acquitted himself well and was warmly received by punters.

Among other hit placings for the likes of Russell Morris
and Ross D. Wylie, Johnny Young produced a full album’s worth
of solid material in 1969’s Smiley.
The LP’s wistful title track was an enormous hit for Ronnie
in December 1969, only just missing out on the #1 spot. It was one of
the few Australian hits of the '60s to directly address the issue of
the Vietnam War, although it was not the first, as is sometimes claimed
-- that honour goes to The Masters Apprentices' Wars Or Hands
Of Time.

The song itself is a fascinating piece of
'intertextualisation': the name Smiley of course refers to the larrikin
farm-boy character in the two famous Smiley movies
made in Australia in the 1956 and 1958, starring Aussie icon Chips
Rafferty -- films which did much to shape the popular images of rural
and outback Australia. The poignant conceit of the song is that young
Smiley, the carefree country boy of the 50s, has now grown to manhood
and is being conscripted to fight in Vietnam (which also calls up an
ironic reference to the title of the second film - Smiley
Gets A Gun.) Johnny Young later revealed that the direct
inspiration for the song was Normie Rowe's National Service call-up.
Further introspective Young-penned songs for Burns’ singles,
like "The Prophet" and "If I Die"
helped to prolong Ronnie’s turn in the spotlight.

After a couple more polished pop albums that featured
well-chosen material from notable singer-songwriters of the day (Gordon
Lightfoot, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Paul Williams and Andy Kim
– alongside prominent input from Aussie writers like Britten,
Cadd and the Gibb brothers), Burns retreated from the glare of the pop
music spotlight for some time, revelling instead in marital bliss with
his wife Maggie, a former Go!! Show
dancer; the 1971 b-side track "Maggie Mine"
co-written by Ronnie and Johnny Young, was dedicated to her.

Like many other former pop idols, Ronnie made a career
on the club and cabaret circuit, as well as making regular appearances
on TV variety shows. In the early 1980s he branched out into interior
design, and was quite successful for a time, but unfortunately the 1988
stock market crash led to the collapse of his business.

In the '90s Ronnie and family moved to Tasmania and for
much of the decade he performed in the highly-successful hits showcase
Cotton,
Morris & Burns, with old muckers Darryl
Cotton
and Russell
Morris. In 1998 he hosted a commerical TV special that dealt
with "predictions and prophecies"; the show (justifiably) copped a lot
of flak from skeptics but was very popular with audiences.

In 2000 Ronnie retired from live performance to
concentrate on setting up an alternative lifetyles centre near his home
in Tasmania, and his place in the trio was taken by former Masters
Apprentices lead singer Jim Keays.

At left: Ronnie on Australian
Story (Image source: ABC)

The Burns family hit the news again in a big way later
in the year when Ronnie and Maggie's daughter Lauren won the gold medal
in Tae Kwon Do at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. (A sad footnote to this
story is that Lauren's Melbourne home was burgled and her medals stolen
in late 2003). In October 2001, Lauren, Ronnie, Mike and Maggie
featured in "Unbreakable", an episode of Australian Story
on ABC-TV that looked at Lauren's career. On the same night Ronnie was
guest of honour in an episode of the Nine Network's This Is
Your Life, which also featured many old friends -- Johnny
Young, Darryl Cotton, Russell Morris, Molly Meldrum, Marcie Jones --
and Ronnie's family, including a funny appearance by Mike Burns, who
cheekily sent up his dad by miming to Coalman while
wearing some of Ronnie's 60s gear, including a rather groovy coat that
Ronnie revealed he had bought in London while shopping in Carnaby St
with Barry Gibb!

Ronnie's enduring popularity with audiences demonstrates
the affection and esteem that he still commands, as an example of those
simpler, more innocent times, when a guy with a hip haircut, dimpled
cheeks, an appealing voice and a swag of great tunes could reduce
teenage girls (and in some cases, boys alike), to delirium. Long live
Ronnie Burns, one of our truest pop heroes!